P4P8X FSB 800Mhz overclock

[John Smith]

I have been trying out the overclocking of the FSB as well as overclocking
my 2.60GHz cpu, Hyper Threaded.
An utility called CPU-Z, version 1.20 is reporting the FSB as 225.0 MHz (Bus
Speed 900.0 Mhz).
This seems rather high for a motherboard that I initially bought only
supporting 533 MHz FSB, with a bios update allowing the overclocking.
My CPU is running at just under 3GHz, my ram is DDR400 (PC3200), the same
utility program reports it as running around the 225 Mhz range.
I've been running my system for several hours without any problems, playing
the game Halo while one or another program is running in the background.

 

[Paul]

I have been trying out the overclocking of the FSB as well as overclocking
my 2.60GHz cpu, Hyper Threaded.
An utility called CPU-Z, version 1.20 is reporting the FSB as 225.0 MHz (Bus
Speed 900.0 Mhz).
This seems rather high for a motherboard that I initially bought only
supporting 533 MHz FSB, with a bios update allowing the overclocking.
My CPU is running at just under 3GHz, my ram is DDR400 (PC3200), the same
utility program reports it as running around the 225 Mhz range.
I've been running my system for several hours without any problems, playing
the game Halo while one or another program is running in the background.

Your Northbridge is an 865P, which is related to the 865PE and the 875P.
The latter two quite easily make it to 250MHz, so there is no reason why
the 865P cannot.

I expect what Intel is doing, is binning chips all based on the same die.
The 875P are the best, and they have the CSA port pinned out (package
has the most pins on the bottom). The 865PE is next best, and to save
money, the CSA port is not connected from the die to the package. The
865P is selected from those chips that were found not to do FSB800.

Now, in any binning operation, whether it is processors or Northbridges,
you never get the right product mix from the production line. So, what
this means is, a lot of the time, the low end chip requirements are
being filled by perfectly good chips. Just like virtually all Athlon
2500+ could be successfully overclocked (at least until recently, when
AMD apparently changed the locking method).

Enjoy,
Paul